


turn the lights off when you leave

by anonymousAlchemist



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, aka jeans hunger, i refuse to explain anything more, lets take that to its logical conclusion, okay, so well, someone was talking about the junger, the one where barry bluejeans is the hunger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 18:48:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13487544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymousAlchemist/pseuds/anonymousAlchemist
Summary: in another world, barry bluejeans grows disenchanted with existence





	turn the lights off when you leave

**Author's Note:**

> because i got so many fucking "jeans hunger" aka "junger" anons about the hunger being denim and also barry and i was like 
> 
> well okay lets take that to its logical conclusion.

Once you start studying death everything starts looking like life. 

#

The problem with death is that souls are immortal. They teach that in Sunday school, they say it at the temples at solstice, they explain that on the first day of class in NEC-001 at TSU. It’s true, because the meat always rots but the skeleton remains. The ivory underpinnings, the gaseous spirit: it is all eternal. There are equations to prove it. Here is the soul — x. Here is the body — y. Solve for z. 

It’s strange, Barry thinks absently, the first time he brings back a thrall. Nothing ever ends. 

#

What is the hunger but necromancy on the largest scale? 

Lights out, nobody's home, unplug the universe and it’s bedtime. There was a game Barry played as a kid, one that he still thinks about every few months. In the game you walked through worlds and solved puzzles and the people you would encounter were nervous and kind and when you got to the end, you destroyed everything you were supposed to love. Then you decided whether to turn off the world. 

There was a light switch. It could be turned to “off.” 

Turning it off would be a kindness, Barry reasoned, and always ended the game. 

#

We don’t need to talk about how desire for absence becomes all-consuming. We don’t need to talk about a man with square glasses and the occasional stutter. He goes to work, he comes home, he folded away his dreams in the pocket of his denim pants. 

He’s not good at people, he thinks. He’s not good at a lot of things. 

#

The Starblaster’s crew consists of six individuals. The captain, a cleric, a fighter, and three mages. It’s all the ship needs — it’s a research expedition is only supposed to last for two months. 

#

I don’t know how to explain to you, that you have to care. That you have to have people to care about. How easy it is to get lost, when it’s you and your own mortality alone in an office, you and your basement filled with cadavers, how easy it is for indifference to wind around your heart like a creeping vine, how easy it is to choke in your own apathy when you see that entropy is impermanent and life is not change but stasis. 

How easy it is, to want to disappear. How easy it is to want the world to disappear with you. 

#

Barry Bluejeans has only ever been good at magic. 

He is very, very good at magic. 

#

The Hunger is an aberration that exists in all multiverses. 

#

The Starblaster races away from their home planet and the Hunger swallows it up, a dark blue, almost black mass. There are no stars yet. Just void. The crew watches from the deck and there is nothing they can do. They are six people against a crashing tide. The captain pushes the bond engine as far as it goes and it is only barely enough power for them to punch through the veil between universes and enter a new planar system. 

“We almost didn’t make it, huh?” Magnus says a little nervously. 

“We made it,” Davenport says firmly. 

“What was that?” Lup asks. 

Nobody has an answer for her. Not yet. 

#

They have three mages and one cleric: it’s simple arithmetic. Lup’s always liked facing her opponents head-on. 

She drops into the parlay. The room she finds herself in is a workshop, like many other mage’s workshops that she’s been in. There are desks covered in papers, magical trinkets, glowing bits and bobs, beakers filled with substances. Jars with skulls, with a cat’s preserved paw, a femur. 

He’s a necromancer, she realizes. Him, being the man sitting at the desk, who seems surprised to be there at all. Middle-aged, the beginnings of crows feet, grey starting to dust his temples. He’s not unattractive. 

“What, uh, what are you doing here? Why am I here?” he asks, blinking, taking off his glasses and rubbing them on his shirt. “This is not what I expected, uh, at all.” 

“Well let me just be straight with you, babe: are you the black vore cloud?” Lup asks. 

“I’m Barry,” the stranger says. “Black  _ vore _ cloud?” 

“Nice to meetcha Barry,” Lup says, ignoring his question and smiling her sharpest smile.  She slides into a seat next to him. “I’m Lup.” 

#

Lup is always struck by is how small the hunger looks, how he's just a guy in jeans an a t-shirt. He looks like he doesn’t want to be here. he always kills her painlessly. She wonders how he kills so many worlds. 

He explains: death doesnt matter its just assimilation in the end.   
He explains: you can come back from death, it’s all a state of mind    
He explains: I wish i didn’t exist, uh, you know?

Lup always sits across from him and the first time she does, she says: "I don’t understand where you're coming from," and he says "I don’t have to convince you, everything dies." 

She doesn’t know what to say to that, so she says "Would you like to play Egyptian Ratscrew with me?" and he says, "I’ve never played that game."

“There’s a pack of cards on your desk,” she says. “I’ll teach you.” 

He never seems unhappy to see her. 

#

And it’s not so much that love saves him, because love is impotent in the best of times, but its her hand on his when he slaps the card before she does, the way she laughs when she wins, the way he wishes that he met her when he was a man and not a thought-concept made of entropy. 

#

“You need to stop,” Taako says. “Seriously my dude, I miss you, and you’re like, always dead.” 

“That’s a morbid way of puttin’ it,” Lup says mildly, passing Taako his eyeliner. 

“It’s true! How much info has it given you, anyway?” Taako says shrewdly. “C’mon. We’ve picked the guy’s brain for everything it’s got.” 

“I think he’s lonely,” Lup says thoughtfully. “I bet I could change his mind, if I kept talkin’ with him. It’s sorta a waiting game, I think.” 

“Would changin’ its mind stop it?” Taako asks, and passes Lup her eyeshadow. 

“I guess not,” Lup says. 

“Don’t tell me you’re gonna miss it,” Taako says. 

“Him,” Lup says. “Not it.” 

#

“Do you wish I was dead?” Lup asks, ten minutes before the end of what she knows will be their final meeting. 

“I wish I could assimilate you,” Barry says frankly. “Oh, uh, I didn’t mean it like that. Not like that.” 

Lup laughs. “You deffo meant it in a sex way, babe,” she says. 

“Lup,” Barry says, infusing the word with exasperation, and she knows him well enough to understand his vocal cues. 

“Barry,” she says, looking him straight in the eye.

“I’ll miss you,” she doesn’t say. 

“You’re wrong and I’m right and I’m gonna kick your ass,” she doesn’t say. 

“I think in another life I would have really liked you,” she doesn’t say. 

Lup sighs. She smiles. 

“

“Don’t lose yourself, okay?” she says.

Then she casts magic missile using a ninth-level spell slot on herself and the Parley parlour dissolves into white. 

#

Here is what Lup thinks about when she becomes a lich: her brother, her family, the worlds she has saved, the ones she has failed to save, the way waking up feels on a Sunday morning with nothing to do, the heat of bonfire at midnight, and the way that Barry looked at her when she died in his office, proof that there is a beating heart under all that black. 

#

The problem is, Barry thinks, as the Hunger assimilates him back into its fold, as it eats him up and unstiches his consciousness thread by thread. The problem is that he doesn’t want her to stop existing.

#

You know the rest of this story: it’s one about memories and locked-up girls and umbrellas, about lovers and fighters and the sort of men who laugh about tragedy because they do not remember caring, about moons and secrets and a vault where a jellyfish swims cheerfully. Subtract a single red robe. Life still finds a way. 

#

All things return to from what they came. 

Barry sits next to Lup on the balcony outside his lab, and he knows that none of this is real because there’s only his building, surrounded by ocean. That’s where life started, he remembers. Single cell eukaryotes swimming. It’s late afternoon, if time means anything where they are. 

"It’s not gonna be easy, you know that, right," he says.    
"Yeah, but at least there’s a chance for it to  _ happen, _ " she says, and he doesn’t know what to say to that so he puts an arm around her shoulder and they watch the sunset, slow, into the ocean. 

It feels like giving up. It feels like the unraveling of a mistake. He was wrong, he knows that now. He wishes he could have found her earlier, or differently, or that he was different or that time, space, all of that had conspired to make them meet sooner. He wants a world where they are not potential but realization. That’s strange, he thinks. He wants. 

“Another life,” he says, the lips that form the words fading. “I’ll find you.” 

And the pressure on her shoulders gone, like smoke, like a ghost, like nothing was ever there. 

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this at 2 am and also for two hours this morning. unbeta'ed, hot and fresh off the presses. dont even look at me i dont fucking know. just kidding tell me what you thought, i am so tired. love youuuu thanks for reading byee
> 
> im on tunglr @[anonymousalchemist](http://anonymousalchemist.tumblr.com/).


End file.
